By Dave McKee
October 31 was the deadline for submissions to the federal government’s public consultations on the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). The date, Halloween, is auspicious since capitalist trade deals like USMCA and its predecessor NAFTA play plenty of tricks on working people while delivering truckloads of treats to monopoly corporations.
Ottawa says the consultations will “inform Canada’s priorities” in preparation for the first joint review of the deal (which the Canadian government calls CUSMA) in 2026.
Among the submissions were detailed ones from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), United Steelworkers (USW) and Unifor, all of which identified shortcomings in the current deal. They urge the government to take a strategic approach to the review which emphasizes working people’s needs, while proposing amendments to the deal to make it work better from a labour point of view.
Labour’s criticisms of USMCA
The USMCA is built upon the foundations of its predecessor NAFTA, which came into force in 1994 – in fact, it was the outcome of a renegotiation of NAFTA in 2018, and it retains most of the provisions of the 1994 agreement.
The labour movement had mobilized across Canada – both through its own organization and in coalitions with other social movements – to oppose NAFTA as well as its predecessor, the 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. As the NAFTA renegotiation approached, the CLC’s assessment of free trade was scathing:
“More than 20 years after signing on to NAFTA, the ways it has failed working Canadians are very clear. Canadians were told that NAFTA would create good jobs, shared prosperity, and a better future for working people. Instead, far from generating good jobs and prosperity, NAFTA has undermined secure, well-paid employment and devastated manufacturing and processing industries and the communities that depend on them. While there has been increased trade and economic growth, large corporations and investors have gained the most, leaving workers behind. NAFTA doesn’t just govern trade, but empowers foreign investors to sue Canadian governments, threatening public services and limiting the ability of governments to regulate in the public interest. This so‑called free trade agreement has not fostered fair or balanced trade.”
At the same time, though, the labour movement welcomed the opportunity to “renegotiate” this failed deal. Gone were the protests on Parliament Hill and the country-wide mass mobilizations of the 1980s and 1990s – they were replaced by “expert” round tables and lobby efforts. Once the USMCA was finalized, the labour movement leadership claimed a victory of sorts because of certain improvements.
Fast forward to 2024, and the labour leadership has largely adopted the same tone and strategy – critique, but belief that improvements can be negotiated. Unifor was the most critical of the three union bodies in its submission to the consultation – noting that USMCA is mostly unchanged from NAFTA and that it has “left Canadians worse off” – but even it then proceeds to propose amendments to make the deal work better.
While the unions’ critiques of USMCA and its predecessors is useful and rooted in working-class experience under those trade agreements, and their suggestions for specific elements of a “worker-friendly” trade deal are generally good, the problem is with their acceptance of this – or any – corporate trade deal as a fact of life.
These are capitalist trade deals, forged in the interests of the largest monopolies and shaped by the parameters set by the most powerful capitalist state, the US. As such, it is deeply concerning that the leadership of the labour movement would accept as a starting point that working people have a shared fundamental interest in these deals.
This capitulation to the monopoly capitalist politics is demonstrated by the fact that all three labour bodies echo, in the harshest terms, the capitalist argument that “non-market” economies (read China) and state-owned enterprises are somehow fundamentally wrong and, as a result, are unfair to workers. How much better off would workers in auto, telecommunications or steel industries be if those companies were nationalized, placed under public ownership and democratic control and operated for people’s needs rather than maximum profit?
The CLC submission rightly describes the USMCA review as “one of the key priorities for Canada’s unions” because of the enormous impact that trade deals like this have on workers. And yet, none of the labour submissions proposes an alternative to capitalist – in fact, corporate monopoly-based – trade agreements.
In early 1998, Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor) president Bob White gave the following powerful speech against free trade to the convention of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union in Vancouver. White, who went on to become president of the CLC, argued that free trade deals are all about a vision of what kind of society we want to build. He didn’t go so far as to say the working people need socialism, but his critique of capitalism certainly leaned that way.
With the USMCA review still just less than two years away, there’s time for working people in Canada to organize and mobilize, and bring the labour leadership to a more radical position on trade which is based on a working-class vision of the world we want to live in.
*****
“We must defeat the free trade deal . . .”
By Bob White
The future of Canada I believe strongly and have been saying for over two years, that free trade with the United States goes beyond specific interest and gets to the fundamental question of what kind of a society we want to have and build. In other words, what kind of a Canada will we have in the future?
Is it going to be a Canada as shaped by the giant business interests of the large multinationals-dominated Business Council on National Issues [now the Business Council of Canada], where competitiveness and profit is the only yardstick, where workers are a disposable commodity in a survival of the fittest dog-eat-dog society?
Or is it going to be a kind of society that I believe most Canadians want: a continually developing and growing Canada with a mixed economy including government intervention when necessary; a Canada which recognizes the importance of trade, not just with the United States but with other countries of the world; a society that limits corporate power, that improves our identity as an independent nation, strengthens our sovereignty, and that maintains and strengthens our commitments to our social programs.
Breaking the social contract
These issues, much more than a reduction of tariffs, is what the debate surrounding free trade with the United States is all about. Certainly, the business community understands that very well. They know it goes well beyond a particular industry or narrowly defined interests.
If you think back fifteen or twenty years ago, it was a time of relative optimism about having both continuing economic growth and a steadily improving measure of social justice. Sure, there were tensions, conflicts and problems, but a kind of unwritten social contract emerged: we accepted that the economy was basically a capitalist one dominated by private corporations; business accepted that government regulation and intervention was legitimate to establish a measure of equity.
But as international competition intensified and as the US in particular faced the implications of new competitive pressures, business began to opt out of this informal consensus. Even though so much of the potential of workers and the economy were not being used, even though technology was accelerating, the new message was that workers could no longer expect rising standards of living, and that continued progress towards social justice had to be derailed.
What we had before defined as progress, better wages, better and more responsive working conditions, improved social services, and a general increase in security was now being redefined as the “problem.” Thatcherism and Reaganomics had arrived.
Attempts to spread this new gospel in Canada were, however, hitting some serious bumps. Here, workers fought against concessions and politically, Canadians were not ready to buy the new corporate agenda.
Popular groups oppose
As significant as the corporate sector’s single-minded support of free trade is, equally significant is the scepticism of virtually every organization that represents popular groups in this country: trade unions, women’s groups, the churches, social advocacy groups. In spite of what the federal government is selling, in spite of what most of the premiers have bought, in spite of the unanimity and activism of the corporate community, a social movement opposed to free trade has emerged and developed.
This agreement is about more than the removal of some tariffs. It is about the control and use of our natural wealth, the control over the investment that shapes our industrial structure, and the ability to use popular pressure to influence the direction of the economy and how its benefits are distributed. The free trade debate is, therefore, not just about how we see Canada today, but about differing visions of what we hope to do about Canada’s future.
Reasons to oppose
Opposition to this agreement rests on two basic concerns. The first is nationalistic. Do we want to be more integrated into the United States? Can we further formalize our integration into the United States and really not expect a dramatic erosion of our social, cultural and political sovereignty?
Whatever attractions the US had in the past as a model representing steady economic progress, its dying cities, violent crime, hopeless poverty have seriously eroded this image. This also undermines the credibility of the free-market philosophy that is at its base.
The second and related concern is free trade as a cover for the neo-conservative agenda. Free trade has been called a leap of faith. But for the corporate sector, it is a leap with a very comfortable landing. It is hardly a leap of faith into uncertainty since it gets them what they are really after and it promises results that, once achieved, will have a strong degree of irreversibility.
It is this attempt to end, or at least decisively undermine, any future progressive alternatives that makes free trade so dangerous and so important to the rest of us.
No ‘leap of faith’
For us, unlike the corporations, there is indeed a blind “leap of faith.” We are expected to believe that if we strengthen the power of the corporations over our lives and just leave things to the market, eventually and indirectly good things will rain down on us.
Why should we trust those selling this message? Just as the US model has lost credibility, so is the credibility of business as speaking on behalf of the national interest now being questioned.
Defeat free trade
We must defeat the free trade deal and defeat the attempt to both cement our economic integration into the United States and limit our future alternatives. We must begin to spend our energies on how, not if, we can develop an independent Canada that is compassionate, caring, dynamic, prosperous and proud of the role we play in the world.
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